Will $39M in bodycams slow Phoenix police shootings?
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Phoenix approved a new $39 million contract for police body-worn cameras this summer, expanding the use of these cameras and the technology used to share footage from them.
Since the cameras came into widespread use in Phoenix five years ago, footage from the body-worn cameras has redefined what is normal in criminal justice circles. But their impact on police shootings and police complaints remains contentious, and how to best use the pricey technology remains unclear.
Today more than 90% of the largest U.S. law enforcement departments with 500 or more officers use body-worn cameras. Phoenix has been a forerunner in the use of body cameras since officers started testing the technology in 2013, according to Arizona State University criminologist Michael White.
Phoenix increased its use of cameras in 2019, after a record high number of police shootings in 2018 and a resulting barrage of calls for reform.
The flurry of deadly police shootings and the backlash against the arrests of protestors prompted the U.S. Justice Department to launch a wide-ranging investigation of the Phoenix Police Department, and for the city to hire Interim Chief Michael Sullivan.
Under Sullivan, who came from the Baltimore Police Department as a reformer under a similar probe, Phoenix will expand the use of bodycam technology in the name of transparency. The new contract was approved in June.
In October 2020, bodycam-wearing Phoenix police answered a domestic violence call at the home of Lillian Cocreham in central Phoenix.
The call ended with police shooting and killing George and Emmett Cocreham, the adult sons of Lillian. The majority of the call was caught on body camera video, which played a part in an internal review of the shooting, but it did little to settle what happened that night.
Phoenix was an early adopter of bodycams
In 2013 the Phoenix Police Department gave cameras to 56 officers patrolling Maryvale.
The Center for Violence Prevention and Community Safety at Arizona State University published a study in 2014 that tracked some of the most significant impacts of those cameras. According to the study, the number of community complaints that were filed declined for the 56 officers, while complaints increased with other officers in the same precinct.
Arrests by those same 56 officers went up.
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The study also noted that the most common types of calls recorded involved domestic violence reports. The recorded domestic violence cases lead to prosecutors being 10% more likely to charge a crime and 3% more likely to get a guilty verdict, according to the study.
However, the study flagged the need for more officer compliance in turning the cameras on.
“Fewer than 50 percent of incidents were recorded by officers who had been assigned a body camera,” the study found.
The study concluded that the cameras had benefited the department and the community.
A decade later, some of those early findings still hold true; others do not.
On Oct. 20, 2020, Lillian Cocreham called a nonemergency line to get help with her son Emmett Cocreham, who was having an angry outburst due to a lapse in medication.
She told The Arizona Republic in an interview that she waited on the phone for 45 minutes trying to get a crisis counselor before having to call 911.
On a recording of the call, she is heard telling the operator that she was scared her son would hurt her and kill her.
A man in the background of her call sounds menacing, cursing at Lillian, and telling her to “tell them to come over,” and “we’re ready, come on, bring it on.”
A pair of officers arrive at the house at about 8:45 p.m. The officers turn on their body cameras.
Charging criminal cases
The new city contract includes upgraded cameras and an improved system for storing and sharing the video evidence they record.
The new contract will come with unlimited cloud storage and a management system that makes sharing that footage easier with other agencies. Something that prosecutors in the 2014 ASU study complained took too long.
Even with the footage issues, the number of days it took to dismiss domestic violence cases dropped by about 30 days and getting guilty pleas dropped by 90 days, the 2014 study showed.
Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell told The Arizona Republic that the initial problems with sharing footage were no longer an issue.
The process has been streamlined. What remains a broader problem is having staff go through each piece of footage to redact victim or witness information before entering it as evidence or discovery.
The office doubled its staff for this work to 24 this year.
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Mitchell explained that the usefulness of the footage still remains limited.
Most crimes don’t happen on camera, and when the camera captures some of the crime, prosecutors have to deal with narrow fields of vision and mixed recording quality, she said.
Mitchell added that educating a jury about what footage can and can’t offer has become a part of the prosecutor's job.
She said most people, and most juries, don't understand the camera limitations and need to be guided through footage used in court.
Still, MCAO's policy remains: If the crime is caught on video, "every effort should be made to view that video, if at all possible, prior to charging it," Mitchell said.
In some of the crimes that are captured on camera, including domestic violence calls, assaults against police or DUI stops, the footage helps capture what can’t be expressed in a report or in testimony, according to Mitchell.
“It just takes the emotion of the moment, the stress of the moment out of the equation and, understanding the limitations of cameras, we can see with our own eyes what happened,” she said.
As more footage becomes available, her office will continue to see its further use in court.
The bodycam footage from the Cocreham shooting starts when officers begin talking to Lillian outside her home. In the video, she tells the officer that her son Emmett wants to kill her.
This footage was edited down, narrated and published online by Phoenix police through a Critical Incident Briefing.
On the tape, Lillian sounds panicked as she tells police that Emmett and George are in the house. The video shows her blurred-out face talking to one of the officers. It’s dark, and what is most clear is the house windows from which light pours out.
She warns the officers that they shouldn’t go into the house because they might get attacked.
The police ask if there were any weapons in the house. She says she doesn't know.
Lillian goes back into the house to try and get Emmett to come out and talk to the officers, but this sets George off, and he starts yelling at her.
One officer reports that one of the brothers is looking through the windows with a flashlight and a handgun. The officer calls for backup.
It later turned out that the handgun was a BB gun that looked real, but police also found a rifle in the house.
After a cut, the video resumes in the back of the house with officers who are carrying rifles.
The officers shout at Emmett and George, who are at the back of the house. Officers keep yelling at them to get closer. There is some discussion about one of the brothers holding what might be a gun, but guns are never clearly visible in the video.
After one of the brothers yells back at the police that he can’t hear what they are commanding, both brothers walk back into the house.
Minutes later, Emmett walks from the side of the house toward the back door. Then one police officer shouts, “He’s got a …” as George opens the back door.
“Oh, oh!” one officer shouts. He fires his gun. Both brothers are seen falling.
The Maricopa County Attorney's office closed the criminal investigation into the case in April 2022, without filing charges.
But that didn't end the legal saga.
Complaints
National studies show that agencies that adopt body-worn cameras have seen a decrease in community complaints, much like the 2014 study in Phoenix reported a drop in complaints with the officers wearing cameras.
White explained that the reasons behind the drops are not immediately obvious.
It could be because people are less likely to make frivolous complaints against officers with cameras, or it could be that officers are less likely to act inappropriately knowing that a camera is on, White said.
The department said that a big part of its commitment to transparency and accountability comes from a review of the footage.
”Videos are routinely reviewed by first line supervisors, Quality Assurance supervisors, the Compliance and Oversite Bureau, the Professional Standards Bureau, the Body Worn Camera unit and Executive Staff members,” Phoenix Police Sergeant Phil Krynsky wrote in an email to the Arizona Republic.
The department reviews both successful and “challenging” interactions and applies what they learn to evolve training, Krynsky explained.
Lillian Cocreham filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the city in September 2021. In her complaint, she details what happened that night and a list of reasons she believed that the shooting could have been prevented.
Most notably, the complaint said, there was no “objective evidence, photo or video that proved that George was holding a gun” when police opened fire on both sons.
Effect on police shootings
Nationally, one of the most commonly researched impacts of body-worn cameras has been their effects on police shootings.
But studies are divided on what effects, if any, cameras have on the rate of police shootings.
A study conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago between 2015 and 2019 found that implementing cameras had no significant effect on the use of force in the 800 law enforcement agencies that participated in the study.
But White has been persuaded that cameras have had a positive effect, based on other studies.
“Just over half of the 30 studies have found reductions in use of force,” he said.
It’s not an overwhelming number, but he believes analyzing the conflicting reports will reveal more about how each police department is affected by the use of cameras.
Since the widespread introduction of cameras in Phoenix, the rate of police shootings per 100,000 people has climbed from 0.9 in 2019 to 1.4 in 2022, according to data pulled from Phoenix and the Census Bureau.
Since 2017, criminal charges against police officers for murder or manslaughter have been increasing nationally year over year. The highest number of charges came in 2021 with 21 charges, according to a study by Bowling Green State University in Ohio.
The number of fatal police shootings has also increased year over year for the last five years. In 2022 there were 1,242 people killed in police shootings in the U.S., according to a database managed by Mapping Police Violence.
Jesse Showalter is a local attorney who represents families of police shooting victims and deaths in custody. He said he isn't sure if the number of civil cases against police has gone up, but camera footage has increased the ability to have a successful outcome in the cases, whether via settlement or courtroom win.
He said that camera footage also plays a role in deciding if he can take a case to trial.
“I routinely turn down cases because I review the body-worn camera, and I’m able to see from that body-worn camera that, legally, there is not a strong case to be brought,” Showalter said.
Cameras have changed our expectations in the short time they have been incorporated. Everyone expects officers to have a bodycam at this point, and so do juries, he said.
Mitchell explained that the prosecutor's office does something similar when reviewing cases against officers in criminal court.
When it comes to shootings involving police, her office reviews each piece of footage extensively.
“I absolutely think it has a significant impact on either the decision to charge or not charge,” she said.
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While the footage may not be the definitive evidence in these cases, they add something, whether it’s audio or visual, she said.
“One thing that it really conveys to people is just how quickly these things happen and how quickly we are asking our law enforcement to make these very, very split-second decisions,” she said.
Ben Laughlin of Poder in Action, a community organization that works with families whose loved ones have been shot by police, is upset at how police departments use bodycam footage.
He said it is often first presented through Critical Incident Briefings, in which police use the footage to justify their actions rather than hold themselves accountable.
Critical Incident Briefings, like the one in the Cocreham case, are narrated by police public affairs officers by providing information pulled from police reports and offering an interpretation of what took place based on the initial investigation.
These briefing videos are made for every police-involved shooting in Phoenix within 14 days of the incident.
But there have been times when those narratives fall flat, as new information comes to light, according to Showalter.
“I think body cameras have resulted in some acknowledgment that police should not necessarily be taken at their word,” he said.
Two years and seven months after her sons' shooting, Lillian Cocreham walked past the bullet holes in her home and complained about two things: police didn’t tell her immediately that her sons had been killed, and they had initially told her that one son had shot another.
In the Critical Incident Briefing, the officer narrating said that “evidence suggested” that George had fired a rifle.
About a month after their deaths, detectives came to Lillian and admitted that officers had killed both sons, she said.
The two officers who had fired at the brothers were Officer Adrian Juarez and Officer Laker Dohan, according to court records.
The city decided to settle the case, and in June the City Council approved a $1 million payment to the family.
The Police Department’s Professional Standards Bureau started an internal investigation that remains open.
Bodycam footage offers mixed value
After other shootings, the footage, as presented now, does more harm than good, Laughlin said, suggesting that maybe we shouldn’t be pouring more money into the program, especially when there are so many other needs our communities have.
Roger Smith of Phoenix's Office of Accountability and Transparency said his department uses the footage as part of monitoring investigations.
His office monitors the quality of investigations conducted over police shootings and other complaints against police conduct.
Monitors in his office can use the footage to determine if the questions investigators asked and witnesses they interviewed were sufficient.
Camera footage lets them see who was there and determine if investigators talked to the most relevant people.
They can catch something investigators missed using camera footage, he said.
“You see a lot of things in terms of the officers' behavior, the civilians' behavior and the circumstances of the incident that need to be asked about in the course of the investigation. You get to ask better questions, because you're seeing those body cameras,” he said.
Smith explained that cameras have been doing what people expected from them, but it is the response to the footage where people are falling behind.
“This is the situation that sort of bugs me constantly, is the situation where you look at a body camera footage, or a piece of body camera footage, and everybody can agree, what we just looked at. And somehow the response is deficient,” he said.
Smith said he hopes to see more footage informing policy change and public conversations about police conduct.
Laughlin agrees that the response needs to be improved.
He said that he has never seen the city take the available footage and do a comprehensive investigation.
He thinks the ongoing U.S. Department of Justice investigation could potentially be the first time Phoenix footage gets investigated on a large scale.
The Police Department turned over 19,800 body-worn camera videos to the Department of Justice as it continued its investigation into the department.
According to White, 95% of all the footage recorded by law enforcement agencies goes unseen.
The next step for agencies is figuring out how to use the unseen footage best.
Under the new contract, police will increase the capacity to upload an unlimited amount of footage from the cameras and store it on a cloud service.
Expectations and doubts
Phoenix police’s biggest assets remain to be the men and women who routinely demonstrate hard work, determination, dedication, and resolve to bring justice to victims, according to Krynsky.
The new $39 million technology will help officers work more efficiently, he said.
Krynsky points out that “the increased level of efficiency equates to savings in both investigative time, administrative costs, and an increased availability of department staff and resources.”
For Laughlin and the families of some police shooting victims, the cost of this technology doesn’t make up for the limited accountability they feel is provided.
They believe that exposure to violent policing comes more often from community members using their phone cameras than from body cameras.
Just look at what happened in George Floyd’s case, Laughlin said.
Showalter said that even in cases where video is available, people will more readily believe the story they tell themselves about what happened than what they see.
He singled out the Philip Brailsford case, where Brailsford, a Mesa police officer, was charged with the second-degree murder of Daniel Shaver in 2016 after he shot Shaver in the hallway of a motel. Brailsford was found not guilty, but footage of what happened was captured on police body cameras.
“People look at that video and can still become just convinced that it shows a certain thing and then another half of people will be convinced it shows the exact opposite,” he explained.
He said that his concern with cameras is the need for more audio in some of the footage.
The cameras that Phoenix uses have a 30-second advance recording from the point that an officer turns the camera on. But that 30 seconds is soundless.
Sometimes that little bit of audio tells more of the story than what is seen, according to Showalter.
Smith believes that the expectations society places on technology like cameras will never be met if people don’t use the footage to make the changes they wish to see.
“Why are we not responding properly and consistently to what we see in the body cameras? Why are we ignoring certain things that we see in the body cameras? Why are we not properly training the things that we can clearly identify are improper, that we see in body camera footage?” he asked.
Even though it was used in her lawsuit, Lillian Cocreham cannot bring herself to watch the footage from the night her sons died.
She listened to the audio during the depositions in her civil case, she said.
"I had to listen to the tape, but I can't watch the video." She said. She could hear her son asking the police to back up because he couldn't hear what they wanted from him.
She had hoped the video might have led to criminal charges, and even though there is an internal review still going on, she has lost faith in the process. She said that the lawsuit was the only thing she could think to do to expose what she saw as a faulty system.
"I just wanted my voice to be heard because this can't happen again, this shouldn't happen to anyone else," she said.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Phoenix police body cameras cost millions while police shootings go up
